At 10 a.m., I am scheduled to meet with the lawyer who will be handling the business operations set to take place in Corsica.
The attorney appointed for this morning's meeting was no ordinary legal mind, but rather a woman whose reputation among the Corsican elite was punctuated by rumors of her proximity to violence, loyalty, and the sort of clandestine operations that shaped the island's underbelly. Sandra Paoli, I'd been briefed, was not only the sharpest lawyer on the island but also the imminent heir to the Paoli clan—a family whose legacy was stitched into every blood feud and backroom negotiation for a hundred years, give or take a vendetta. Her rise was a matter of inevitability. The only question was how soon her uncle would vanish from the game board, and whether her own taste for power would exceed her predecessor's.
The room where we were to meet was in a nondescript law office tucked between a bakery and a funeral home. The irony, I assumed, was intentional. Sandwiched between the commerce of life and the inescapability of death, she would preside over a table stacked with contracts, court summons, and ledgers that, if one squinted, might appear entirely above board. The Paoli family was known for using the formalities of the law as a weapon—not simply to skirt justice but to redefine it for their own convenience. Sandra was said to be the architect of their most subtle and enduring legal victories, writing clauses as lethal as cyanide, and defending her clients with a courtesy that bordered on chilling.
For our organization, the timing couldn't have been better. The Casillas network was poised for an incursion into southern Europe, and the Paolis' hold over the island's ports and customs was the missing puzzle piece for our expansion. If we infiltrated her circle now—before the inevitable bloodletting and coronation—our leverage would be insurmountable. We would be there not as interlopers, but as partners, with the kind of insurance that only comes from being present at the creation of an empire.
I'd spent the previous evening reviewing dossiers, making mental notes about the shifting alliances and the code of silent favors that governed Corsican business. If the rumors were true, Sandra's ascent was controversial even within her own ranks, with plenty of old-guard men who resented her intellect and ambition. That was an opportunity, too; nothing sharpens a person quite like the knowledge that everyone in the room wants to see you fail. Our plan was simple: pitch the business as mutually beneficial, establish the seed of a relationship, and wait for the old man's body to surface in some ravine. Then, with Sandra at the helm and us as indispensable allies, we'd own every shipment that crossed the Mediterranean.
While exploring the area, I stumbled upon a sinister human trafficking ring operated by a group with Albanian ties. The atmosphere was charged with an unsettling energy, as if the very air was thick with unspoken horrors. I found myself standing at a crossroads, unsure of my next move. Memories from the past flooded my mind, recalling the grim reality these victims faced. They were often ensnared in a web of heroin addiction, their lives manipulated and controlled until they were pushed into the dark world of forced prostitution. The weight of this discovery pressed heavily on my conscience, demanding careful consideration of my next steps.
The attorney appointed for this morning's meeting was no ordinary legal mind, but rather a woman whose reputation among the
South of the old port, the limestone streets curved off from the tourist-favored thoroughfares into a district that locals called 'the Backstage,' as in the place where nothing is what it appears. The facades here were kept up for the sake of granting cover to everything that seethed underneath: money laundering fronts, transient brothels, side-street gambling parlors, and the sort of entrepreneurial violence that nobody wrote down but everyone respected. My intention had been to observe, take notes, and retreat before anyone marked my face; the Casillas protocol was clear on the value of stealth during the reconnaissance phase, particularly in a city that monitored new arrivals with the paranoia of an old, toothless king.
But curiosity, more than professionalism, made me linger that morning in the espresso bar adjacent to the law office. The place was a dark, cavernous hole in the wall, with a single barista who watched the world through the reflection of her brass milk steamer. It was here—among the clink of chipped ceramic and the surreptitious passing of folded notes—that I first overheard mention of what the regulars simply called "the Apartment." The barista, a woman whose forearms bore a lattice of faded cigarette burns, had muttered to the delivery boy, "They loaded another one last night." The boy rolled his eyes and, as if in a trance or a dare, muttered back, "It's not our problem, is it?" But his hands shook as he reached for the cash, and the barista's eyes narrowed with something that looked a lot like fear.
I let my gaze drift to the alley beyond the cafe window. A van with tinted glass idled at the curb. In its shadow, a man with an Albanian flag tattooed on his neck smoked and watched the pedestrians with the bored diligence of a predator who knows his prey has nowhere else to run. On a whim, I left my cup unfinished and followed the man as subtly as I could manage, keeping to the uneven sidewalk and pretending to admire the faded murals of anarchist heroes that the city authorities could never quite scrub away.
It was a short walk to the Apartment—a crumbling block of Soviet-era architecture that still housed immigrants, dreamers, and those who had fled violence only to find themselves in another, subtler kind of war. The lobby was a shrine to anonymity: overflowing mailboxes with false names, elevator buttons that responded to no logic, corridors where the lightbulbs were always broken. The Albanian didn't so much as glance behind him; his confidence was the sort of thing that only came from being the most dangerous man in a building full of dangerous men.
I waited a minute, then slipped in after him, praying to whatever force governed these places that I wouldn't be noticed. The air smelled of bleach and something sweeter, almost cloying, as if someone had tried to mask the odor of rot with cheap perfume. On the third floor, outside a door plastered with eviction notices, I heard a woman's voice: muffled, distressed, the rhythm of hope and resignation that always preceded a negotiation that would end with someone giving up something they could never get back.
The door opened, and I glimpsed the Albanian shoving a plastic bundle into a woman's arms. She was thin, her skin the color of curdled milk, and her eyes were dilated to the point of blindness. The bundle mewled, and I realized it was not a package, but a newborn—swaddled in a towel stained with something that was likely not just breast milk. The man said something in a low, brutal language, and the woman nodded, cradling the infant as if to shield it from the world with her own brittle body.
I backed away, nearly tripping over a mop bucket, and hurried back to the ground floor. Outside, the van was already gone, replaced by a police cruiser idling with its lights off. The officers inside were parked nose-to-nose with the brothel's front stoop, but neither so much as looked up from their phones. I wondered, briefly, whether the police were paid in cash or in 'favors'—protection for silence, or perhaps a cut of the trafficking profits. It didn't matter; the result was the same. The building was a warehouse for broken lives, and everyone knew it, but nobody would risk setting it on fire.
I returned to the espresso bar. The barista observed me with an appraising glare, as though she'd already calculated my odds of surviving the day. "You're new here," she said, in Spanish so clipped it almost sounded like a threat. I replied as casually as I could, telling her I was in town for business, that I was hoping to meet some "local fixers." Her smile was thin, but sincere. "You can't fix anything here," she said. "You can only keep it from getting worse."
In every city I'd ever visited on behalf of the Casillas family, I had encountered the same architecture of despair: pretty stories in upper-floor apartments, uglier realities in the basements. But Corsica had a talent for making cruelty seem inevitable—a fact of geography, not human design. The trafficking ring operated with such efficiency and indifference that even the victims accepted their fate as part of the island's natural order.
The morning after, I filed my report with the Casillas lieutenant, outlining the logistics of the trafficking operation with the cold precision I reserved for tasks that made me want to scrub off my own skin. The ring was managed by a loose coalition of Albanian and North African crews. They harvested teenage runaways from the ferry terminals, dosed them with synthetic opiates until their willpower evaporated, and then sold them to whatever brothel or labor camp had the best payment terms. Sometimes the girls died; sometimes, they produced more merchandise; sometimes, if they were lucky, they developed a drug habit valuable enough to guarantee their passage to the next client, like livestock rotated through abattoirs. At every stage, the local police were paid to ignore the evidence, while the Paoli clan charged a "maintenance" fee for every surface bruise and hospital visit that threatened to make headlines.
I'd become adept at writing such reports as if they concerned farm yields or shipping manifests—never people, always product. But today, something snagged my conscience. Maybe it was the sight of the newborn, or maybe it was the way the barista's warning had stuck in my mind, but I found myself lingering over the details, searching for any leverage, any point at which the machine could be jammed.
When the courier arrived to collect the report, he was ten minutes early and had the predatory eyes of someone who'd worked the Backstage since puberty. He thumbed through the pages, scanning for errors, then folded the dossier in half. "You want to get involved?" he asked, not bothering to disguise the contempt in his tone. "That's a good way to end up in the marshes." I shrugged, giving him the practiced smile of someone who understood that all things could be negotiated, even death. "Sometimes a little fire is all it takes to clear out the weeds," I said. The courier snorted, pocketed the dossier, and left without another word.
Officially, the Casillas protocol was noninterventionist: we did business, we observed, but we didn't interfere in operations that had the blessing of local syndicates. Unofficially, though, the family respected initiative. Take out a rival's asset and you could earn yourself a bonus—assuming you did it quietly, and without implicating the network. The dilemma gnawed at me. Every fiber of my training told me to let the trafficking run its course, let the numbers speak for themselves, let the Paoli and Albanian factions bleed each other dry. But I couldn't shake the conviction that the Apartment—its smell, its sound, its utter hopelessness—represented not just a blight on the city, but an opportunity.
If I could disrupt their pipeline, just enough to throw the Albanians into disarray, I could curry favor with Sandra Paoli and her clan. The Paolis abhorred unpredictability; they valued control over all else. A few well-timed 'incidents'—missing shipments, lost girls, mysterious police tip-offs—might make the Paolis see the Casillas family as more than just outside mercenaries. We'd become indispensable consultants, the kind who could solve embarrassing problems without leaving fingerprints.
But that strategy would come at a cost. The girls in the Apartment were not numbers on a ledger; they would suffer the most if the operation went into panic mode. The newborn, the mothers, the runaways—all would be at heightened risk if I acted rashly. I paced my rented room, weighing the ledger of human cost against the profit-and-loss calculus that was supposed to govern my life.
As I stared into the cracked mirror over the sink, I saw not a mastermind but an imposter—someone whose moral calculus had slipped, almost imperceptibly, from pragmatic calculation to something dangerously close to sentimentality. But I knew, deep down, that the city's rot would not abate on its own, and that no one else was coming to save them. If anything was going to be done, it would have to be done by someone who understood both darkness and the limits of mercy.
I made my decision. My first move would be to leak the location of the Apartment to Sandra Paoli herself. If she was as ruthless and shrewd as they said, she'd recognize the value of crushing a rival's unsanctioned pipeline—and she'd remember who'd handed her the match. The girls, I reasoned, would be no worse off under Paoli control than under the Albanians, and at least the transition would be swift.
At 10 a.m. on the dot, I entered the law office flanked by a pair of stone-silent Paoli enforcers. The waiting room was decorated in the style of a mid-20th-century funeral parlor, every surface gleaming with the patina of suppressed violence. The receptionist—a woman whose wrists were tattooed with ouroboros serpents—smiled at me, not kindly, but with the resigned hospitality of someone accustomed to funerals.
"You're expected," she said, and led me down a corridor lined with oil portraits of long-dead clan patriarchs. At the end of the hall, Sandra Paoli waited, her posture so still and precise that, for a moment, I wondered if I'd interrupted her in the act of remembering her own future.
She gestured for me to sit. "You have information," she said, her voice low and deliberate.
"I do," I replied, handing over the dossier as if it were a peace offering. "A trafficking ring, Albanian-managed. They've gotten sloppy. Details are inside."
She flipped through the papers with the speed of an actuary, pausing only once—to study the hand-drawn diagram of the Apartment and its escape routes. When she finished, she closed the dossier and looked up at me with eyes as cold and clear as vodka.
"And what do you expect from this?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said, and that was true. "But I believe our organizations will intersect soon, and you'll want partners who spot problems before they become threats."
Her smile was a razor. "Consider yourself remembered," she said.
I left the office feeling neither righteous nor heroic, but strangely relieved. The city had not changed, not yet, and maybe not ever. But I had set something in motion—a chain reaction that would ripple through the Backstage in ways no one could predict. Maybe, someday, the newborn I'd seen would inherit a world that was marginally less cruel.
For a moment, that was enough. The weight in my chest eased, just slightly, and I allowed myself to imagine a future in which darkness could be contained, even if only for a little while.
I straightened my tie, took a last look at the sunlit alley, and prepared for the next round of negotiations.
Corsican elite was punctuated by rumors of her proximity to violence, loyalty, and the sort of clandestine operations that shaped the island's underbelly. Sandra Paoli, I'd been briefed, was not only the sharpest lawyer on the island but also the imminent heir to the Paoli clan—a family whose legacy was stitched into every blood feud and backroom negotiation for a hundred years, give or take a vendetta. Her rise was a matter of inevitability. The only question was how soon her uncle would vanish from the game board, and whether her own taste for power would exceed her predecessor's.
The room where we were to meet was in a nondescript law office tucked between a bakery and a funeral home. The irony, I assumed, was intentional. Sandwiched between the commerce of life and the inescapability of death, she would preside over a table stacked with contracts, court summons, and ledgers that, if one squinted, might appear entirely above board. The Paoli family was known for using the formalities of the law as a weapon—not simply to skirt justice but to redefine it for their own convenience. Sandra was said to be the architect of their most subtle and enduring legal victories, writing clauses as lethal as cyanide, and defending her clients with a courtesy that bordered on chilling.
For our organization, the timing couldn't have been better. The Casillas network was poised for an incursion into southern Europe, and the Paolis' hold over the island's ports and customs was the missing puzzle piece for our expansion. If we infiltrated her circle now—before the inevitable bloodletting and coronation—our leverage would be insurmountable. We would be there not as interlopers, but as partners, with the kind of insurance that only comes from being present at the creation of an empire.
I'd spent the previous evening reviewing dossiers, making mental notes about the shifting alliances and the code of silent favors that governed Corsican business. If the rumors were true, Sandra's ascent was controversial even within her own ranks, with plenty of old-guard men who resented her intellect and ambition. That was an opportunity, too; nothing sharpens a person quite like the knowledge that everyone in the room wants to see you fail. Our plan was simple: pitch the business as mutually beneficial, establish the seed of a relationship, and wait for the old man's body to surface in some ravine. Then, with Sandra at the helm and us as indispensable allies, we'd own every shipment that crossed the Mediterranean.